The poet Juvenal in a well-known line remarked that the penniless traveller (or walker) will sing within earshot of a robber. In modern times the picture has rather lost its poignancy, since robbers have deserted our highroads and content themselves with organising bazaars; but the significant conjunction of the words ‘Cantabit’ and ‘viator’ remains. To sing, hum, burble, whistle or generally adumbrate music is at once the distinction and the pride, the duty and the pleasure, of walkers. Under the influence of a fine day and a pleasant country the voiceless and tone-deaf have been known to emit sounds coming well within the orchestral range (interpreted liberally and so as to include the instruments of percussion), while the most moderately and modestly musical of men become on a walk encyclopaedic in their range of melody and Protean in their variety of tone-colour. There is surely some natural kinship between walking and music; the musical terms—andante, movement, accompaniment—are full of suggestive metaphor; and the sacred symbol of both arts is the wooden stick which marks the strides of the walker and pulsates to the heart-beats of the orchestra.
The most obvious ground for this kinship is rhythm. The simple beat of the foot on the ground, with the natural swing of the body above it, suggests inevitably the beat of the musical bar. It is difficult to walk for long under the sway of that regular ‘one, two, one, two’ without fitting a melody to it; it is even more difficult to hear a melody played or sung when walking without dropping instinctively into its rhythm. A London crowd, that most apathetic of masses, begins to march in unison when a barrel-organ strikes up the ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ or the Intermezzo of Mascagni or some other item from the repertory of mechanical music; and if ever you wish to deride, contemn, trample on and spiritually triumph over a tune (which happens to all of us sometimes), there is nothing more satisfying than to walk past the band or gramophone from whence it issues at a step cutting clean across its rhythm. Had the Sirens lived on land, Odysseus would have needed no wax in his ears; he could have waited till they began their incantation (in A flat, three-four time, sixty bars to the minute, lusingando), and then walked by at a brisk step, matched to a breezy anapaestic song or to the incomparable rhythm of his own hexameters.
The simple foot-beat is undoubtedly a potent link between walkers and music; I doubt, however, if it is the only or the chief ground of their musical susceptibility. There are other activities besides walking which have a regular and emphatic rhythm, and yet are not markedly associated with music. Some of these will be treated in more detail later; here it will suffice to mention carpet-beating, the treadmill, and bicycling. The cause is no doubt partly physiological; the carpet-beater and the felon operate in awkward positions, while the bicyclist, even if he does not stoop over his handle-bars and so cramp his lungs, has a current of air in his face which parches his throat and impedes the flexibility of his whistle. The same applies even more forcibly to motorists, were it possible to conceive them as in any relation to music or as fit for anything but treasons, stratagems and spoils—the stratagems being conceived, and the spoils exacted, by the police.
A more potent reason, I think, is the actual bodily condition of a walker, that perfect harmony which comes of a frame well occupied. The carpet-beater operates from the waist upwards, his lower half being as irrelevant as that of a stranded mermaid; the bicyclist forswears his birthright by allying himself to a machine. But the walker is an organism, and therefore a fit vehicle for music. And this inner fitness is matched by the merely material conditions of the walker’s physique. His bodily habit is the right one for singing—for the exercise of the vocal mechanism irrespective of the kind of music produced. A good walker means an instrument in good condition, with a wide compass and a ripe quality of tone. That high A after which you strive at other times with tears and sweat comes without effort; you make trees and the mountain tops that freeze bow their heads with notes which at other times would merely make the accompanist blench; your runs sound like a bird soaring into the empyrean and not like a lame man going upstairs; your trill is at last a trill, clearly distinguishable from a yodel. And when the day is done, what singing is there like that of a walker in his bath?
These two facts, the natural beat of the foot and the bodily exhilaration of walking, account for a good many of the ordinary walking songs, the cheerful melodies of simple rhythm, which recall a flagging company to courage and unison. Chief of these is the famous ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in his grave.’ Tradition dictates that this must be sung on the principle of cumulative omission—the first verse in full, the second without the word ‘grave,’ the third without ‘his grave’ and so on, the blanks being filled by beats of the foot. Thus in the last verse but one, the first three lines consists only of the word ‘John’ and seven foot-beats, thrice repeated; while in the last verse of all there are twenty-three beats in complete silence, until the whole company comes in on the words, ‘But his soul goes marching on.’ It is a point of honour to count these beats and the pause preceding them exactly right, so as to get a unanimous attack with no false starts. For reviving the attention and good feeling of a tired company, there is nothing like John Brown; and, it may be mentioned, it will carry them over 576 paces if ‘a-mouldering’ is reckoned one word, or 640 if it is reckoned two, as the more orthodox hold.
Walkers may be thought perverse in making a fetish of a song like ‘John Brown’—which is in origin, I suppose, a threnody on the death of an eminent man—when there lies ready to hand such a store of specifically walking tunes. I allude, of course, to that ancient and well-established form of music, the March. There is no age of man which has not had its marches, whether it called them anapaests or war-songs or what not. Further, the feelings which marches express are wide in range and highly impressive in character. Military glory, religious pomp, state ceremonial, weddings and funerals—all these have their appropriate setting in the march rhythm. Or, in other words, when man celebrates his greatest achievements or his highest aspirations, when he makes the big adventure of his life or the greater adventure of his death, the most natural and human expression of feeling is to walk to the strains of music. Marching, in short, is the epic form of walking, and march tunes are the epics of music—the formal embodiments of communal feeling on the great occasions of life.
But communal feeling is not the whole of life, and marching is not the only, nor indeed the best, form of walking. Marching presupposes a disciplined company and a hard road; it reduces all to the measure of the least, resulting in that cramped and debased form of motion known as the military ‘stride’; rhythmically, it over-emphasises the beat of the foot and neglects the other elements in the walking motion. In the same way, marching tunes seem often to win their popularity at the expense of their quality, and to border on dulness, if not triviality. To say that marches express the great moments of life is perhaps inaccurate; strictly they deal not with the feelings of the hero or king or priest or corpse or bridegroom, but with the feelings of the bystanders about these feelings. Now it is a regrettable fact that ordinary men on ceremonial occasions tend to take a slightly superficial view of the proceedings. I doubt if the Cives Romani assembled at a triumph thought about the imperial greatness of Rome so much as the fit of the proconsul’s cloak, the personal appearance of the chained captives, or the chances of a stampede among the elephants. Similarly at a wedding, the linked destinies of two young lives, the eternal vows flung out by the unquenchable courage of man across the unsubstantial hazard of futurity, are not, as a rule, the first and only preoccupation of the guests. Hence it comes that the most popular march tunes have often a suggestion of artificiality or even insincerity. The orthodox Wedding March is deliberately artificial; it was written to represent—and does most exquisitely represent—the wedding of six semi-mythical lovers seen through the glamour of the fairy-haunted forest of midsummer: it is somewhat out of place at a decorous union of citizens. Similarly, of the three popular Funeral Marches, one is tinged with decorative pomposity, and one with Little Nell; only one casts over the hearer the very shadow of death.
However this may be, in actual fact the walker on the hills, alone or with a few companions, has little to do with marches. His rhythm is not a bare ‘one, two, one, two’; it is a long swing from the hips to which the whole body sways, a complex of stresses in which the foot-beats only mark the periods. And his feeling is not that of a crowd at a show: it is something deeper, more contemplative, more individual, a function of many variables, of himself, what he is, what he does, of last week, last month, to-day, the face of the country, the influence of sun and wind. And the music which he craves as his counterpart—nay, the music which he actually hums or sings or whistles—is rarely the music of the march.
What it is may be disputed. At one time or another I have heard nearly every kind of tune sounding to the steps of a walker. Wagner and Purcell, Sullivan and Anon, symphony and opera, tone-poem and folk-song—nothing (with one exception) seems to come amiss to a walking company. And from this very large and variegated body of music one most remarkable fact emerges—namely, that nearly every kind of rhythm can, at some time or other, be accommodated to the walking stride. Regarding man as a biped, naturally inclined to ‘lead’ with one foot rather than the other (generally the left), you would say that even rhythms with two or four beats to the bar would suit him best; and perhaps (in the lowest sense of ‘nature’ as the starting point and not the finishing post) the natural rhythm of walking is the ‘one, two, one, two.’ But man is more than a biped; and if he likes a tune with three or five beats to the bar (or seven or eleven for that matter), he is quite capable of stepping accordingly, and of either ‘leading’ with each foot alternately, or of overlooking altogether the difference between the natural stresses of his feet. Further, as regards the three-time rhythms, many of them go quick, so that only one foot-beat is needed in each bar; and there is the incomparable six-eight, of which more will be said in the sequel.
At this point the scandalised mathematician inquires, What becomes of the tempo? Is not the effect of walking on music purely Procrustean? A walker (let us say) takes two strides to a second; in order to suit his steps, a tune in even time must go at a particular rate, selected from the following schedule, to wit, (a) two bars to a second, with one foot-beat in each bar; (b) one bar to a second, with two beats in each bar; (c) one bar to two seconds, with four beats to each bar; for practical purposes we need not go beyond this point. For the three-times, there is an even more sharply divided scale, viz. (a) two bars to a second, one beat to each bar; (b) one bar to a second and a half, three beats to each bar; (c) one bar to three seconds, six beats to each bar. What, asks the mathematician, happens to the tunes whose proper pace falls, let us say, between (a) and (b): must they either be drawn out languorously to fit (b), or feverishly accelerated to fit (a)?
The answer to the mathematician’s question is that in practice no difficulty arises. In the first place, a walker’s rate of stride varies to some extent according as he is going uphill or downhill, on grass, rock, or road. Secondly, a little licence may surely be claimed by a walker in varying the orthodox tempo. After all, even conductors do this sometimes; and if one tune has to go a little quicker than an orchestra takes it, another will have to go a little slower, which is (I understand) only a slight extension of what the musicians call ‘rubato.’ Thirdly, and as a minor point, we may set against any possible disadvantages the peculiarly fine effects which the walker obtains in augmentation, when he whistles a tune with one step to a bar and repeats it with two steps to a bar. Finally, it is only in the three-times, between (a) and (b), that the matter becomes at all serious, (b) being one-third of the rate of (a). Now, it is a curious fact, that all the good three-time tunes (to speak broadly) fall quite easily under either (a) or (b). Cheerful songs and jigs and scherzos and most six-eight tunes go naturally with one step to each group of three notes, the swing of the body marking the weak stresses; more solemn themes, funereal folk-songs, the Unfinished Symphony, the last movement of the ‘PathÉtique,’ and the Tristan prelude go naturally with three steps to a group of three notes; the Pilgrims’ March takes six, with complicated cross-accents when the ‘pulse of life’ begins. The intermediate class of three-times, between (a) and (b), taking about one second or two strides to a bar, and therefore cutting across the walking rhythm, are generally waltz tunes, which no one in his senses wants to sing on a walk.
If the mathematician still persists, we can silence him by remarking that in any case the tempo is not the most vital point in walking tunes. If all that we desired were a measure to suit our steps, ‘John Brown’s body’ and the ‘Dead March’ would be enough. The real thing which matters is not the tempo but the character of a tune. Nothing proves the stuff of a tune so surely as to sing it on a walk; music which can stand this test must have some real substance in it. The walker need go through no conscious process of judging, accepting, refusing; let him merely walk, with his mind ranging at large and a tune sounding on his lips or working unuttered in the inward ear, which is the joy of solitude; without his knowing it the assize will be held and judgment pronounced. The shoddy sentimental phrase, which sounded so alluring at 11.30 p.m. yesterday among the potted palms in the conservatory, turns thin and sour by day on the ruminant palate of the walker. The theme which sounded hard and obscure takes on a new meaning as it pulsates to the rhythm of the stride: obscurity reveals hidden purposes and possibilities of melody; hardness becomes strength; and the whole sinks gradually into the inner parts of the walker’s consciousness where music abides beside the springs of thought and action.
Songs and marches are good, no doubt, and ‘John Brown’s body’ is a strong staff in moments of fatigue; but better than these, and nearer to the spirit of walking, are the great themes, the structural tunes which uphold the fabric of symphony or opera. For the mood of a man as he walks is thematic; there are certain main currents of thought in his head, clear and distinct at first, which have to be developed and interwoven and combined and contrasted and turned upside down before they can be restated with all the added volume of meaning they have acquired in the process, or finally summarised and emphasised in the coda (after tea). His thoughts are not homogeneous, self-contained wholes like those of ordinary life which issue in words and actions; they are shifting and variable, moving continuously, and continuously changing; they dwell in a region apart from the world of action and experience, though related to it and coloured by it. Hence the music to which they naturally adapt themselves is not the definite tune with a beginning, a middle, and an end; it is rather the theme, which has no fixed form, but develops and germinates and changes its colour and shape, and reveals itself only through varied manifestations. So a man may whistle a theme when he starts in the morning, forget all about it as he sinks into the contemplation of walking, and yet find at evening that all the day it has been working in the fabric of his thought; and when next he hears it on an orchestra it will come to him with an added richness of meaning, with a suggestion of the wind in his ears, the shower on his face, and a large contemplation enwrapping him.
It is on the mood which walking induces, rather than on the rhythmical character itself, that the affinity between walking and music mainly rests. There are other bodily activities besides walking which have a rhythm, some a much more marked and interesting rhythm; and yet these are not usually accompanied by music, and do not seem to feel the need of it. Eminent among these are the two very noble rhythms of a hurdler and of a racing crew. In an actual hurdle race there are possibly difficulties in the way of musical accompaniment: the competitors generally move at different speeds (or it would not be a race); and the tune in any case would have to be a short one, lasting about sixteen seconds. But a rowing crew has necessarily a uniform and well-marked rhythm, and can continue its activity for a considerable time: prima facie, it would form a fine subject for a descriptive tone-poem in the modern style, the orchestra including rattles, a pistol, a bell, and a bass tuba (the coach), the roar of the crowd and the swish of the aeroplanes forming ‘colour,’ with the steady rowing rhythm proceeding underneath. And yet, as far as I know, this tone-poem has not been written. The nearest approach that has yet been made to the rowing rhythm is the ’cello theme in the Unfinished Symphony; but the rest of the movement is hardly in keeping. The Eton Boating Song, whatever its other merits, is a complete failure as a picture of rowing; it suggests much more forcibly what happens after the race. The fact is, that the rower’s mood is not, like the walker’s, a musical one: it is too practical, too mechanical, too much bound down by time and space; it lacks the large speculative outlook which calls for music as its natural counterpart.
The same criticism applies even more strongly to another form of bodily motion, namely dancing. Prima facie, it would appear that in relation to music, dancing is first of the bodily activities and the rest nowhere. Dancing is, in theory, the pure embodiment of music in motion; walking is an activity primarily directed to other ends, and only accidentally associated with music. However much the walker may appreciate music, however thematic the structure of his mood, he has to be getting along; whereas the dancer has no such locomotive limitations,[1] but can stop or stand on one leg, or go round in circles, or do anything else which appears suitable to the character of the music which inspires him. Further, the dancer has his band, or at least his piano or harmonium, tangible and within earshot; the walker nearly always has to produce or imagine his music for himself. Any appreciation, therefore, of music which the walker can achieve by suiting his steps to it, would seem but a pale shadow of the dancer’s rapture, as he flings himself, unhampered by any other thought, into the intoxicating whirl of the waltz.
But this by no means exhausts the superiorities of dancing, considered as a purely artistic form of motion. Dancing contains or admits of artistic elements of which walking knows little or nothing. One of these is figure; whereas the walker is bound to move along a more or less straight line, the dancer can move in circles or squares or ellipses and can thus employ all the resources of decorative art. Second, and more important, is the fact that dancing can be concerted; the individual dancers can move in correlative or supplementary motions forming one rhythmic system. The best rhythmic unity which walkers can hope for is a mere unison of stride and step. But the unity of dancers’ movements can be organic—a harmony, a unity of differing elements, a type of the perfect man or the perfect state. A concrete presentation of the ideal, aided by all the resources of bodily grace, music, and decorative art—such, in short, is the essential character of dancing; and beside it walking cuts a very poor figure.
Imagination boggles at the ultimate possibilities of dancing. Far back in the dim and unenlightened past, the dance on the shield of Achilles seems wonderful enough—the wreathed maidens of costly wooing and the youths in well-woven doublets, their hands on each other’s wrists, speeding in lines and circles, while a divine minstrel (who, I regret to observe from the brackets, is textually under suspicion) made music on his lyre. And this is only Homeric dancing, and the centuries that have elapsed since the lamented death of the author have seen one continual process of development in all the elements involved in dancing, most of all in music. Youths and maidens could dance nowadays in figures subtler than the line and circle, to music other than the simple melody of the lyre. We might have—indeed to some extent we have—recital-dances by a single performer. We might have chamber-music dances—four or five trained and expert athletes mingling and intertwining in figures growing more complicated and with motions less classical as the music grows later in date. We might have concerto-dances with a single supreme performer whose motions are accompanied and enforced by others. We might have symphony-dances—a systematised performance in elaborate figures, with a definite motion by a group of dancers to represent each theme, modified in the development section, repeated in the recapitulation, returning emphasised and strengthened in the coda. Lastly, we might have an intoxicated riot on no particular plan and call it a dream-phantasy. Before such conceptions the walker can only call attention humbly to the rhythmic elements in his own craft, and pass on with bowed and reverent head.
And then, as Xanthias says after Dionysus’ News from the Front, ‘I woke up.’ We look round the actual world for this realisation of the rhythmic ideal, and what do we find? Thirty couples waltzing, in inadequate space, at a late hour, in a vitiated atmosphere, to the tune of the ‘Merry Widow.’[2] Where are the complex and concerted figures? Where are the trained and exquisite movements? Where are the subtleties and varieties of rhythm? The figure is rotatory, roughly elliptical, varied by collisions and pauses for breath. The bulk of the dancers plainly do not know what training is. The rhythm is as varied as that of a clock and much less subtle than that of a motor-omnibus. The dancers are talking instead of attending to business; the atmosphere reminds one of the Thames Valley on a November afternoon; the thermometer is at 72°; the tune makes one ill. Something very serious seems to have happened to that conclusive prima facie argument which we presented so faithfully above.
The hygiene of dancing and the physical conditions of dancers are very interesting subjects, and have, I think, a close connection with dance music; but for the present let us pass them by and take only the essential points. The outstanding fact is the progressive limitation of dancing to one form and one rhythm. Evidence on such a matter is hard to collect, for there is little in the way of printed record; but I can speak with first-hand knowledge of a provincial culture of the late ’nineties, which is probably a fair equivalent of the metropolitan culture of the early ’nineties. In this culture there were several forms of dance, now completely extinct, which, although of a low grade anthropologically, contained at least the rudiments of higher things. There were concerted dances—with a perceptible figure—the Swedish dance, Sir Roger de Coverley, and, relatively a masterpiece of ingenuity, the Lancers. They were not much as dances; their figures were still at the lowest level of geometrical art and could have been executed with a ruler and compasses; their organisation demanded, without overstraining, the intelligence of a normal child of eight. (The Grand Chain in the Lancers perhaps required a little more and formed a beautiful moral analogue, since its success depended not on the most but on the least capable person present, with the result that it often broke down.) Still, with all their futility, these dances contained the elements of organisation and figure. Where are those elements now?
It was the same with rhythm; our culture was low, but had its possibilities. There was a form of motion, somewhere on the confines of dancing and jumping, called the Galop—a series of wild rotatory leaps or shuffles, which would have made a cannibal war-dance appear relatively dignified or even sophisticated, but formed no mean test of wind and limb. There was that daring rhythmic variety, the Polka, which even had dotted notes, with a neat anacrustic jump on the quaver following. There was a further reach of human enterprise into triplets, called the Pas de Quatre, with an inspiriting high kick. And there were various barbarisms from America and elsewhere to remind us that there are depths below depths. I have no wish to champion these relics, still less to advocate their restoration; but over their dishonoured grave it is only fair to remark that they were distinct varieties of rhythm, and pointed the way to further developments. That way is now closed.
For what have we now? My evidence for the present century rests mainly on hearsay, but the witnesses are unanimous. The concerted dance is gone; the dance with a figure is gone; nearly all rhythmic varieties are gone, except one. There are, to be sure, occasional reversions to barbarism, which display some rhythmic variety, but these are ephemeral, relatively rare, and depend more on posture than on rhythm for their interest. If we view the 1902-1912 dance culture as a whole, there is no denying that the single staple form is the waltz—a plain homogeneous three-time rhythm, with no figure and no organisation, taken throughout at a uniform pace which is fixed annually at something approaching a bar to a second by the Congress of Incorporated Dance Musicians.
On its merits as a form of motion opinions are divided. For those who like it, the waltz is the supreme form of bodily motion, enshrining all grace and all rhythm, opening the doors of paradise and lifting the dancer to a rapt ecstasy of sense transcending the bounds of reason, or words to that effect. To those who dislike it, the waltz seems a singularly dull, monotonous and undistinguished form of rhythm, poles asunder from the clean movement of a free man. But whether good or bad, it is alone; there are no other dancing rhythms which need be seriously considered. So we reach this curious result, that while rowing, which has no relation to music, has produced at least three very interesting rhythms (the racing-stroke, the paddle, and the picnic-party), and while walking, which has on the physical side only a secondary relation to music, has produced at least four rhythms (the amble, the uphill, the downhill, the full stretch along the flat); dancing, which is music in bodily form, has shrunk to one rhythm, and that one very simple, perfectly uniform and strictly limited in tempo.
To inquire how this has happened would carry us beyond even the liberal limits of this discussion. It may be another instance of sheer human perversity, or in other words, the instinct of other people to do what we don’t like. The waltz may be a concession to human weakness, figure and organisation and rhythmic variety having been found to overtax the intelligence of the normal dancer. Some would say that the real point is not so much the rhythm as the fact of dancing in couples—the romantic interest, in short. There is no time to examine this theory: I pause only to note its subtle suggestion of Victorian sentiment and even more of Victorian politics. The round dance thus represents society as an aggregation of mutually exclusive monogamic units, taking their independent way and avoiding each other as much as possible; the art of ball-room steering becomes the analogue of Mill on Liberty. The Homeric dance equally typifies a society organic in all its members; but I digress.
Whatever be the cause, the fact is clear, that for practical purposes dancing is reduced to the waltz. If so, what seemed prima facie absurd—to admit walking to a comparison with dancing on artistic grounds—is clearly anything but unreasonable; the balance rather inclines the other way. On the point of rhythm, walking can beat dancing both in subtlety and variety; the other artistic elements, figure and organisation, which might give the superiority to dancing, have been thrown overboard. The unison of walkers is as much and as little a harmony as the unison of waltzers; the figure of a walk is, like the figure of a waltz, a plain line, with the difference that it is shaped not by four walls, a dais, benches, potted plants, and the possibilities of collision, but by the rise and fall of the ground, the accidents of rock and vegetation, the configuration of our mother earth and her waters. Dancing, by surrendering its other possibilities, falls to the level of walking; by concentrating on one rhythm, it sinks below.
Even so, the waltzer will reply, is not the comparison still, in spite of your sophistries, absurd? Does the walker with all his rhythmic variety achieve any real sympathy with music comparable to the rapture of waltzing? Does not the very concentration of dancing on this form mean that it is the one artistic motion, the one bodily movement which can really express music? The walker may be able to fit music to his steps, but it is a mere extrinsic connection; the waltzer moves in music, and his soul is one with that of the waltz composer.
The waltzer has hit the real point. It is of little use to argue in the abstract about the merits of this or that rhythm; we must take rhythm and music together as a whole if we are to form any judgment about them; waltzing ultimately stands or falls by the character of the music it has inspired. What, then, of waltz music considered as a whole? We can at once concede this to the waltzer, that his music is something quite distinct and apart from the rest of music, unique both in rhythm and melody. The rhythm must, for practical reasons, be absolutely uniform—three notes to the bar, sixty odd bars to the minute, a strong accent on the first note of each bar marked either in the melody or the accompaniment, dotted notes being a rare luxury and syncopations and cross-accents even rarer. The character of the music is hard to describe in words, but in practice unmistakable: it is smooth and melodious, appealing strongly and at once to the senses, stimulating or intensifying rather than dilating the imagination; it is built generally on phrases of equal length, which should, if possible, imply or repeat each other so that they can carry the dancer along and ‘run in the head’ (like water), even when he is distracted by the heat, the unwonted exercise, and his partner’s conversation. In short, a waltz is ‘catchy’: and to anybody who has ever heard one, further description is superfluous.
Waltz music, then, as a whole, has a definite character of its own. The question follows: is it a good character? To discuss this necessarily involves offending some one; but to carry all parties along together a little further, let us note two points on which all will agree. The first is that in judging waltz music, dancers use a criterion which is not applied to other music. There are certain waltzes of the great masters in which they attempted to use the form for musical purposes; unfortunately, they most of them strayed into syncopations and irregular phrases, and failed to make their tunes sufficiently catchy; consequently they are rarely heard in the ball-room, and the dancer’s verdict on them is that they are very fine music, no doubt, but not good to waltz to. At the other end of the scale are certain waltzes, in fact quite a large number, which no one would attempt to defend seriously on musical grounds; the dancer’s verdict is that they are possibly not much as music, but are good to waltz to, and he proceeds to wallow in them. Thus waltz music, besides having a special rhythm and a special character, is judged by a special criterion—i.e. whether it is good to waltz to, which practically means, whether it has this special rhythm and this special character, a regular three-time unobscured by rhythmic variations, and a strong sensuous appeal undistracted by any demand on the intellect.
The second point is simply another aspect of the same thing; to wit, the fact that in the normal reasonably good concert—taken, in its widest sense, to include orchestral and choral performances, chamber music, and recitals of all kinds—the waltz rhythm is extremely rare and the pure waltz even rarer. The ordinary concert-goer in a year’s experience will have ranged over practically every other kind of rhythm and (under the guidance of his programme) every other field of emotion; he will have quailed at the relentless tap of destiny, in two-four time; he will have bestridden the narrow world like a Colossus or plumbed the depths of grief or passion, in slow three-time; he will have wondered and frolicked and wondered again, in quick three-time; once or twice at least, he will have had his only relief in a fever of tortured imagination, in five-four time. (Note that every one of these is a walking tune.) But where are the medium three-times? Where are the waltz tunes? How often in his year’s experience has he come across the true waltz atmosphere? Perhaps thrice: in SuppÉ’s ‘Poet and Peasant’ Overture (if he cannot escape in time); in the Hoffmann ‘Barcarolle,’ which, by the way, is used in the opera to accompany a particularly brutal murder; and in the ‘Valse Triste’ of Sibelius, where the rhythm is employed with the very definite (and very gruesome) dramatic purpose of representing the imagination of a dying woman curdled by the stale memories of debauch. The one famous movement that is called a waltz is really much nearer a minuet; it is marked ?=138, and can be walked to. Take together as a whole what may be called the ordinary mass of good music, and you cannot resist the conclusion that for some reason the musician will have nothing to do with the waltzer or his atmosphere.
The separation is complete. On the one hand we have music, which issues from life and returns upon life, which appeals to something very deep within us, making every kind of thought and feeling its minister—the music which fitly accompanies us as we walk. On the other hand, apart and alone, judged by its own criteria and bounded by its own conditions, we have the waltz music, related not to life but to a very small, narrow, and detached phase of it, appealing only to the senses, and these in a very abnormal state. Faced with this contrast, we can only say to the waltzer that here our ways part, bid him farewell, and proceed to denounce him.
For the state of the waltzer is something frightful to contemplate. The progressive limitation of dancing to the waltz rhythm is but the outward sign of an inner limitation of feeling, by which the waltzer cuts himself off from the rest of humanity and the rest of his own life, placing between himself and them the barriers of a bad art and a bad hygiene, and so fencing off his little paradise, his illuminated interspace of world and world, where never creeps a cloud, nor moves a wind. At a late hour, in a special costume, under artificial light, in a vitiated atmosphere, stimulated by abnormal food and drink; with every external condition that can unseat the judgment, suspend the continuity of good sense, and cut off the sane feeling of relation to the day that is past and the morrow that is to come—is it any wonder that he needs a special rhythm to move in and a special kind of melody to move to? And so the wheel moves in a vicious circle. The ambitious waltzes of the great masters impose a strain on the intellect; they have little direct sensuous appeal; they are recondite, discontinuous, frigid, tiring; they have no go; away with them to the outer darkness (to the stars and the fresh air). But from the cafÉs of Vienna arises a very different voice, sensuous, regular of rhythm, rich with the glamour of late hours, the swish of skirts and the slither of feet; however vulgar, however trivial, it is good to waltz to; bring wreaths of laurel to usher the conqueror in!
But to what a paradox are we come! Dancing, the highest of the bodily arts, which should be in the closest alliance with the companion art of music, appears its deadliest foe. The dancer, who should co-operate with and inspire the musician, is merely a burden to him; instead of pointing the way to further developments, he restrains him relentlessly from all rhythmic variety, from all reaches of feeling and character which do not fall within the narrow limits of being good to waltz to. With the shackles of a cast-iron rhythm he cramps his spirit: with the miasma of the waltz atmosphere he pollutes his soul. Is it any wonder that, with this prospect before him, the reputable musician turns his back on the ball-room and shakes the French chalk from off his feet? And when he is gone the charlatan sees his opportunity; and the end of it all is the dance music of to-day, expressing nothing beyond the mere dance atmosphere, indicating no feelings above the level of instincts, pointing the way to no developments, but an isolated system, cut off from all contact with the normal thoughts and feelings of humanity, exotic, expressionless, unfruitful, as only a hothouse hybrid can be.
O Freunde, nicht diese TÖne! Fellow-walkers, have nothing whatever to do with dance music! You who ply your craft by day, in the open, in easy clothes, whose thoughts roam at large over yesterday, to-day, to-morrow, and repose upon the sane continuity of experience, what part have you in the glamour of the waltz? You who stride from a hundred to a hundred and twenty steps to the minute, with a long swing from the hips, what have you to do with the waltz rhythm? Between you and it there is a gulf fixed. On the further side lights shine, and patent leather slithers over the polished floor, and the band has just had supper and is muting its strings for a particularly impassioned appeal; you cannot answer to that call, you cannot move in that rhythm, without forswearing your birthright as a walker. But on this side of the gulf are hills and fields and sun and wind, and as we go we shall whistle a stave to the rhythm of our stride. And if you would know what this rhythm is, look up the work from which I have copied the words that begin this paragraph, and turn back to the second movement. Or better still, turn further back in the bound volume, and find the Allegro of the seventh symphony. There is the song of walking, the sacred music of our craft. The rhythm (Illustration: music notes) is the exact measure of the stride, buoyant and elastic, with the uneven note marking the hoist of the outside leg from the hip. The tune swoops at us suddenly like a gusty breeze, plunges into the deep pianissimo, vanishes, and returns to a tremolo on the strings which suggests that it has been going on somewhere else all the time; it shifts and changes like the face of earth with the shadows racing across it. If music can ever be bound to time or place, surely we may assign this Allegro to a day in April when we surmount some height like Wetherlam or Maiden Moor, issuing in a long ridge, and swing forward over grass and rock with the wind in our ears and the earth spread out below.
(O Richard Wagner, you who called this movement the Apotheosis of the Dance, what did you mean by it? In that august Valhalla where you justly repose, no doubt by now you have met the author and apologised; but can you do nothing to reassure us on this side of the gulf? Can you not send some authoritative message, or at least work a concurrent automatism, to say that you are sorry?)
Is there any hope for dancing? Is the vicious circle to go on for ever? Is the gulf too deep to be spanned? Let us trust not: it would be tragic if dancing, the union of motion and music, were for ever to be represented only by that misshapen monstrosity, the waltz. Certain practical reforms are necessary before any development can begin; dancing must be performed by day, in fresh air, in reasonable costume, to good music. A minimum level of physical competency must be demanded, backed by proper training; as a provisional test, I would suggest excluding any one who would be refused on sight by the secretary of a fourth-class lacrosse club. New rhythms must be introduced and developed, and concerted dances organised, the dancer working throughout in close co-operation with the musician. When these changes have been made, the way is clear, and dancers can begin to take their craft seriously.
Until then nothing can be done; here at least, in the ball-room, where nature sickens, nothing. As Dr. Middleton said, ‘it is the time for wise men to retire within themselves, with the steady determination of the seed in the earth to grow. Repose upon nature, sleep in firm faith, and abide the seasons.’ For the change must come; if civilisation is based, as it surely is, on reason, the waltz can not be anything more than a temporary aberration. If omnipotent at present, it must ultimately be doomed: if we do not see the change, our grandchildren will. Against that day, when the waltz shall figure with our other fooleries before the inexorable Vehmgericht of posterity, let this at least be put on record, that in our own times, in the height of its popularity, when the false doctrine was expounded with all the art of Viennese composers and backed by all the weight of social authority, not every one acquiesced. Some at least shook their feet clear of it, and were content to tread the roads and hills to simple measures in the unadorned light of day, and to hand on, in however rudimentary a state, a tradition of free movement and clean rhythm to the wiser generation ensuing.
